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Deeplinks Blog posts about WIPO

This week WIPO is holding the final round of talks on establishing a WIPO Development Agenda. The WIPO Development Agenda offers the possibility of creating global intellectual property laws that balance rightsholders' interests with the human rights of the world's citizens for access to medicine and knowledge. The scope of proposals on the table is truly amazing. WIPO is being asked to create ways to protect the Public Domain and to rebalance its technical assistance to developing countries. But so far, the talks have been marred by procedural stalling and little agreement on specifics. Now it's crunch time. In the next five short days, WIPO member states have to come up with concrete recommendations for the September WIPO General Assembly.

What does WIPO do when it's trying to secure agreement on an important treaty, but is facing fierce resistance? It organizes a meeting outside of home base in Geneva, with "experts" and businessmen to "educate" select countries on the need for the new treaty and try to shore up support. WIPO's latest meeting on the draft Broadcasting and Webcasting Treaty, announced just this morning, will take place on June 21 in Barcelona, Spain. It features a number of the experts who have spoken at previous WIPO events, including last year's controversial non-public regional consultation meetings organized in place of the regular copyright committee meeting that is open to all accredited organizations.

As we reported last Friday, the public interest won a big victory at WIPO's latest meeting on the Broadcasting Treaty. The contentious provisions creating unjustified rights for webcasters and simulcasters will be removed from the treaty. While this is good news, the battle isn't over yet. The remainder of the treaty draft covering "traditional" broadcasters and cablecasters still poses significant problems, and the webcasting and simulcasing proposals are still in play, as a separate draft treaty moving through a slower process. Drafts of the revised broadcasting/ cablecasting and new webcasting/ simulcasting treaties are due by August 1.

The meeting of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights on the new Broadcasting/ Webcasting Treaty has just concluded and there's some welcome news for those of us in the Internet Community.

Webcasting - which was in the current draft of the treaty as an opt-in Annex - is now going to be removed from the main treaty draft, and put into a new proposal of its own, which will be discussed at a separate meeting, and proceed on a parallel slower track.

Efforts to finalize a treaty focusing on broadcasting and cablecasting in the "traditional" sense will continue on a faster track. The Chair will create a new treaty draft by August 1, which will be finalized at one further meeting of the Standing Committee. Then a recommendation will be put to the WIPO General Assembly in September to convene an early 2007 Diplomatic Conference on the "traditional" Broadcasting Treaty. (See below for the Chair's summary of the new two-track process).

The U.N. World Intellectual Property Organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights Committee meets this week to discuss the latest redraft of the contentious new Broadcasting Treaty. The treaty would give broadcasters, cablecasters, and potentially webcasters, broad new 50 year rights to control transmissions over the Internet, irrespective of the copyright status of the transmitted material. It also requires countries to provide legal protection for broadcaster technological protection measures that will require Broadcast Flag-like technology mandates.